Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (35 page)

Nevertheless, it soon became clear that the showdown with Hillsborough depressed Franklin. His friend Strahan noticed that he had become “very reserved, which adds greatly to his natural inactivity and there is no getting him to take part in anything.” It also made him far more pessimistic about the eventual outcome of America’s growing tensions with Britain. One could see in Parliament’s actions “the seeds sown of a total disunion of the two countries,” he reported to the Massachusetts Committee on Correspondence, which brought out the more radical side of him. “The bloody struggle will end in absolute slavery to America, or ruin to Britain by the loss of her colonies.”
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Despite such pessimistic feelings, Franklin still hoped for a reconciliation. He urged the Massachusetts Assembly to avoid passing an “open denial and resistance” to Parliament’s authority and instead adopt a strategy designed “gradually to wear off the assumed authority of Parliament over America.” He even went so far as to advise Cooper that it might “be prudent in us to indulge the Mother Country in this concern for her own honor.” And he continued to urge a policy of loyalty to the Crown, if not to Parliament.

This led some of his enemies to accuse him of being too conciliatory. “The Dr. is not the dupe but the instrument of Lord Hillsborough’s treachery,” the ambitious Virginian Arthur Lee wrote to his friend Samuel Adams. Lee went on to accuse Franklin of wanting to cling to his postmastership and keep his son in office. All of this explained, he said, “the temporizing conduct he has always held in American affairs.”

Lee had his own motives: he wanted Franklin’s job as agent in London. But Franklin still had the support of most Massachusetts patriots, including (at least for the time being) Samuel Adams. Adams ignored Lee’s letter, allowed it to leak, and Franklin’s friends in Boston, including Thomas Cushing and Samuel Cooper, assured him of their support. Lee’s attack, Cooper wrote, served to “confirm the opinion of your importance, while it shows the baseness of its author.” But it also highlighted the difficulty that Franklin faced in attempting, as he had during the Stamp Act crisis, to be both a loyal Briton and an American patriot.
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London, 1771–1775

As the summer of 1771 approached, Franklin decided to forsake the world of public affairs for the time being. He had been stymied, at least for the moment, in all of his political missions: the fight against the Proprietors and then Parliament, his pursuit of a land grant and a royal appointment. But he was still not ready to return home. So, instead, he escaped the pressures of politics in the manner he loved best, by taking an extended series of trips that lasted until the end of the year: to England’s industrial midland and north in May, to a friend’s estate in southern England in June and again in August, and then to Ireland and Scotland in the fall.

On his rambles in May, Franklin visited the village of Clapham, where there was a large pond. It was a windy day and the water was rough, so he decided to test his theories about the calming effect of oil. Using just a teaspoon, he watched in amazement as it “produced an instant calm” that extended gradually to make a “quarter of the pond, perhaps half an acre, as smooth as a looking glass.”

Although Franklin would continue to study the effect of oil on water seriously, he also found ways to have fun by turning it into a conjuring trick. “After this, I contrived to take with me, whenever I went into the country, a little oil in the upper hollow joint of my bamboo cane,” he wrote. On a visit to the house of Lord Shelburne, he was walking by a stream with a group of friends, including the great actor David Garrick and the visiting French philosopher the Abbé Morellet, and told them he could still the waves. He walked upstream, waved his cane three times, and the surface of the stream calmed. Only later did he show off his cane and explain the magic.
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His tour of midland and north England in the company of two fellow scientists gave Franklin the chance to study the Industrial Revolution that was booming there. He visited an iron and tin factory in Rotherham, the metal casting shops of Birmingham, and a silk mill in Derby where 63,700 reels were turning constantly “and the twist process is tended by children of about 5 to 7 years old.” In Manchester, he “embarked in a luxurious horse-drawn boat” owned by the Duke of Bridgewater that, befitting the peer’s name, took him onto an aqueduct that crossed a river before ending in a coal mine. Near Leeds they called on the scientist Joseph Priestley, “who made some very pretty electrical experiments” for them and then described the various gases he had been discovering.

Franklin had denounced England’s mercantile trading laws, which were designed to suppress manufacturing in her colonies, by arguing (a bit disingenuously) that she would never have to fear that America would become an industrial competitor. In his letters from his tour in 1771, however, he sent detailed advice about creating silk, clothing, and metal industries that would make the colonies self-sufficient. He had become “more and more convinced,” he wrote his Massachusetts friend Thomas Cushing, of the “impossibility” that England would be able to keep up with America’s growing demand for clothing. “Necessity therefore, as well as prudence, will soon induce us to seek resources in our own industry.”

Franklin returned to London briefly in early June “in time to be at Court for the King’s birthday,” he wrote Deborah. Despite his disagreements with Parliament’s taxation policies, he was still a loyal supporter of George III. “While we are declining the usurped authority of Parliament,” he wrote Cushing that week, “I wish to see a steady dutiful attachment to the King and his family maintained among us.”
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After a fortnight in London, Franklin headed to the south of England, where he visited his friend Jonathan Shipley at his Tudor manor in Twyford, just outside Winchester. Shipley was an Anglican bishop in Wales, but he spent most of his time in Twyford with his wife and five spirited daughters. It was such a delightful visit (Franklin might well have defined delight as an intellectually stimulating country house filled with five spirited young women) that he lamented that he had to leave after a week to attend to the correspondence that had been piling up in London. In his thank-you note to the Shipleys, which included a present of dried apples from America, Franklin complained that he had to “breathe with reluctance the smoke of London” and said he hoped to get back to the “sweet air of Twyford” for a longer visit later that summer.
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Franklin, at 65, had begun to think about family matters more. He felt affection for all of his kin, despite the fact—or perhaps, as he himself speculated, because of the fact—that he continued to live far away from them. In a long letter to his sole surviving sibling, Jane Mecom, that summer, he praised her for getting along well with her Philadelphia in-laws and, in a telling passage, reflected on how much easier it was for relatives to remain friendly from afar. “Our father, who was a very wise man, used to say nothing was more common than for those who loved one another at a distance to find many causes of dislike when they came together.” A good example, he noted, was the relationship their father had with his brother Benjamin. “Though I was a child I still remember how affectionate their correspondence was” while Benjamin remained in England. But when Uncle Benjamin moved to Boston, they began to engage in “disputes and misunderstandings.”

Franklin also wrote Jane about Sally Franklin, a 16-year-old who had joined his surrogate family on Craven Street. Sally was the only child of a second cousin who had continued the Franklin family’s textile dyeing business in Leicestershire. Accompanying the letter was a detailed family tree showing how they were all descendants of Thomas Franklin of Ecton and noting that Sally was the last in England to bear the family name.

His interest in family was further piqued when he happened to visit one of his favorite used-book shops in London. The dealer showed him a collection of old political pamphlets that were filled with annotations. Franklin was amazed to discover that they had belonged to his Uncle Benjamin. “I suppose he parted with them when he left England,” Franklin wrote in a letter to another cousin. He promptly bought them.
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So, in late July, when he was finally free to return to Twyford for a longer stay with the Shipleys, he was in a reflective mood. His career was at an impasse, and the history of his family was on his mind. Thus, the stage was set for the first installment of the most enduring of his literary efforts,
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

“Dear son,” he began, casting his account as a letter to William, whom he had not seen for seven years. The epistolary guise gave him the opportunity to be chatty and casual in his prose. He pretended, at least initially, that this was merely a personal communication rather than a work of literature. “I used to write more methodically,” he said in a paragraph he inserted into the text after rereading some of the rambling genealogical digressions he had composed on the first day. “But one does not dress for private company as for a public ball.”

Was the autobiography really just for the private company of his son? No. It was clear from the outset that Franklin was writing for public consumption as well. The family information that would most interest his son was omitted completely: the identity and description of William’s own mother. Nor did Franklin write the letter on regular stationery; instead, he used the left half of large folio sheets, leaving the right half blank for revisions and additions.

At the beginning of his second day of writing, he stopped to make an outline of his entire career, showing his intention to construct a full memoir. Also, that second morning, he used the blank right-hand columns of his first pages to insert a long section justifying the “vanity” of his decision to “indulge the inclination so natural in old men to be talking of themselves.” His goal, he declared, was to describe how he rose from obscurity to prominence and to provide some useful hints about how he succeeded, expressing hope that others might find them suitable to be imitated.

This was obviously directed at an audience beyond that of his son, who was already 40 and the governor of New Jersey. There was, however, a subtext directed at him: William had taken on airs since becoming a governor, and he was far more enamored of the aristocracy and establishment than his father. The autobiography would be a reminder of their humble origins and a paean to hard work, thrift, shopkeeping values, and the role of an industrious middle class that resisted rather than emulated the pretensions of the well-born elite.

For almost three weeks, Franklin wrote by day and then read aloud portions to the Shipleys in the evening. Because the work was cast as a letter, and because it was read aloud, Franklin’s prose took on the voice of a lovable old raconteur. Lacking in literary flair, with nary a metaphor nor poetic flourish, the narrative flowed as a string of wry anecdotes and instructive lessons. Occasionally, when he found himself writing with too much pride about an event, he would revise it by adding a self-deprecating comment or ironic aside, just as would a good after-dinner storyteller.

The result was one of Franklin’s most delightful literary creations: the portrait he painted of his younger self. The novelist John Updike has memorably called it an “elastically insouciant work, full of cheerful contradictions and humorous twists—a fond look back upon an earlier self, giving an intensely ambitious young man the benefit of the older man’s relaxation.”

With a mix of wry detachment and amused self-awareness, Franklin was able to keep his creation at a bit of a distance, to be modestly revealing but never deeply so. Amid all the enlightening anecdotes, he included few intimations of inner torment, no struggles of the soul or reflections of the deeper spirit. More pregnant than profound, his recollections provide a cheerful look at a simple approach to life that only hints at the deeper meanings he found in serving his fellow man and thus his God. What he wrote had little pretension other than pretending to poke fun at all pretensions. It was the work of a gregarious man who loved to recount stories, turn them into down-home parables that could lead to a better life, and delve into the shallows of simple lessons.

To some, this simplicity is its failing. The great literary critic Charles Angoff declares that “it is lacking in almost everything necessary to a really great work of
belles lettres:
grace of expression, charm of personality, and intellectual flight.” But surely it is unfair to say that it lacks charm of personality, and as the historian Henry Steele Commager points out, its “artless simplicity, lucidity, homely idiom, freshness and humor have commended it anew to each generation of readers.” Indeed, read with an unjaundiced eye, it is a pure delight as well as an archetype of homespun American literature. And it was destined to become, through hundreds of editions published in almost every language, the world’s most popular autobiography.

In this age of instant memoirs, it is important to note that Franklin was producing something relatively new for his time. St. Augustine’s
Confessions
had mainly been about his religious conversion, and Rousseau’s
Confessions
had not yet been published. “There had been almost no famous autobiographies before Franklin, and he had no models,” writes Carl Van Doren. That is not entirely true. Among those who had already published some form of autobiography were Benvenuto Cellini, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Bishop Gilbert Burnet. But Van Doren is correct when he says that Franklin “wrote for a middle class which had few historians. His book was the first masterpiece of autobiography by a self-made man.” The closest model that he had, in terms of narrative style, was one of his favorite books, John Bunyan’s allegorical dream,
A Pilgrim’s Progress.
But Franklin’s was the story of a very real pilgrim, albeit a lapsed one, in a very real world.

By the time he had to leave Twyford in mid-August, he had finished the first of four installments in what would later become known as the
Autobiography.
It took him through his years as a young printer engaged in civic endeavors and ended with the founding of the Philadelphia library and its offshoots in 1731. Only in his last lines did he let a note of politics creep in. “These libraries,” he noted, “have made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defense of their privileges.” It would be thirteen years before, at the urging of friends, he would pick up that part of the tale.
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Always eager to create a family wherever he could find one, Franklin took the Shipley’s youngest daughter, Kitty, 11, under his wing and brought her in his coach back to London, where she was going to school. Along the way, they chatted about the type of man each of the Shipley daughters would marry. Kitty felt all of her sisters deserved a very rich merchant or aristocrat. As for herself, Kitty coquettishly allowed, “I like an old man, indeed I do, and somehow or another all the old men take to me.” Perhaps she should marry a younger man, Franklin suggested, “and let him grow old upon your hands, because you’ll like him better and better every year as he grows older.” Kitty replied that she would prefer to marry someone already older, “and then you know I may be a rich young widow.”

Another lifelong flirtation was born. He had his wife send over a squirrel from Philadelphia as a pet for all the Shipley girls. When the creature met an untimely end a year later in the jaws of a dog, Franklin composed a flowery epitaph and then added a simpler one that would become famous: “Here Skugg/Lies snug/As a bug/In a rug.” His affection for Kitty would be immortalized fifteen years later when Franklin, then 80, wrote for her a little essay on “The Art of Procuring Pleasant Dreams.”